Chronicling a trip to China to manufacture a product

Category Archive: My Experience

At the electronics market there are lots of booths of people selling iPhone cases, USB thumb drives, cell phone trinkets, and other useless but high margin plastic things. They prey on the thousands of visitors from around the world who are there to get useless “Made In China” crap for their families or get ‘amazing’ …

For the product I’m building (A portable electronic scoreboard), the enclosure is large; 18″x10″. This is pushing the limits of injection molding without using a giant press. It’s certainly too large for a 50 ton press, and the 200 ton is about right. I was looking for other options and wanted to try out thermoforming, …

After reading this post about rioting workers at Foxconn, I thought I should respond with what I saw when I was in Shenzhen. The workspace where I’ve had my base of operations for the last two months has an employee who used to work at Foxconn as a test engineer. I asked him a few …

I’ve returned to the United States for a while. There are some things you just shouldn’t try to do in China, and I needed to do those things. If you 1) Need a good internet connection or 2) Need to do rapid prototyping and engineering, then the U.S. is better. China is the place to …

I’ve discovered that white guys carrying manufacturing prototypes are like magnets for people who work for international freight agencies and are also traveling on the subway. All I have to do is sit here and other people come up to me and hand me a business card. This has happened a few times now. At …

Since moving from my old moldy place to a spare bedroom in someone else’s, my morning commute has changed slightly. This puts me directly in front of Ichibenor, which is a chain of bakeries. Inside I found this roll. The green tint is because it’s green tea flavored. The red things are beans, which the …

Today I was browsing the internet in the apartment, and a strange ad came up on the Google maps web site. Normally Google doesn’t show ads on their own pages; especially ones that look like this. I started to do some investigating, and what I found was disturbing. It turns out my internet service provider, …

I recently met someone who has been in China for the last year and Shenzhen for the last two months. He had read this blog and thought ‘he says everything I’ve been thinking but have been too lazy to write.’ Many of the things I’ve described here have also been experienced by the friends who …

This morning I barely avoided serious injury. I had the crosswalk telling me it was ok, I looked both ways, I even slowed down as I started because it looked like a bus was considering going anyway, but it changed its mind. As I crossed, a car on the wrong side of the street was …

Since I’ve been here I’ve seen a parade of disgusting everywhere I go. It’s relentless and it’s exhausting. Here are just some of the notable ones: As I came up the escalator from the subway, a woman was crouched on the sidewalk vomiting into a corner. At least she was kind enough to do it …